Christianity
i
As an instrument of warfare against vice, or as a tool for making virtue, Christianity is a mere flint implement.
ii
Christianity is a woman’s religion, invented by women and womanish men for themselves. The Church’s one foundation is not Christ, as is commonly said, it is woman; and calling the Madonna the Queen of Heaven is only a poetical way of acknowledging that women are the main support of the priests.
iii
It is not the church in a village that is the source of the mischief, but the rectory. I would not touch a church from one end of England to the other.
iv
Christianity is only seriously pretended by some among the idle, bourgeois middle-classes. The working classes and the most cultured intelligence of the time reach by short cuts what the highways of our schools and universities mislead us from by many a winding bout, if they do not prevent our ever reaching it.
v
It is not easy to say which is the more obvious, the antecedent improbability of the Christian scheme and miracles, or the breakdown of the evidences on which these are supposed to rest. And yet Christianity has overrun the world.
vi
If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this that a man should back his own opinion against the world’s—and this is a very risky and immoral thing to do, but the Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy.
vii
Christianity is true in so far as it has fostered beauty and false in so far as it has fostered ugliness. It is therefore not a little true and not a little false.
viii
Christ said he came not to destroy but to fulfil—but he destroyed more than he fulfilled. Every system that is to live must both destroy and fulfil.